1971 Burglary of FBI Office Proved Agency Had Become a “National Political Police”

Today’s news that the—some of the people who exposed the Media files—Media, Pennsylvania, files—have identified themselves gives quite a good opportunity to pay attention to the content of those files, which has not received the attention it deserved. This was quite a remarkable event. The Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI was the central office for a large region. There was an enormous amount of information stored there. The files were liberated, available for the public. And the—what was exposed was quite dramatic. For one thing, it turned out that the major activity of the FBI was essentially as a national political police. Fighting crime and other things were quite marginal. And their activities as a national political police were extremely significant. They were—a large part of it was the program that was called COINTELPRO. That was a massive government subversion operation. It started in the late ’50s, but it really picked up through the 1960s. The first target was naturally the Communist Party, but it very quickly moved on to Puerto Rican independence, Native American movement, the entire New Left, the women’s movement. The major target was black nationalist movements, which were practically decimated.

And it—the activities, the subversive activities, went from defamation, character assassination, efforts to create conflicts within groups by spreading false rumors and so on, all the way up to direct political assassination. 1969 was the peak. It was the assassination of Fred Hampton, the black organizer in Chicago, very effective organizer. Turns out—turned out—this didn’t come out from Media, but a couple years later it came out in court cases that the FBI had tried to have him assassinated by a black gang in Chicago, Blackstone Rangers. They sent fake messages written in kind of their version of black dialect to the Rangers, saying that Fred Hampton and the Panthers were trying to kill their main leader, hoping that the Rangers would react by killing him. Well, they were closely enough integrated so that that didn’t work. And right after that, the FBI essentially set up an assassination. They faked information that the Hampton apartment had guns. They gave it to the Chicago police. The Chicago police broke in at, you know, 4:00 in the morning, murdered Hampton, who was sleeping in bed, maybe drugged, and Mark Clark, another organizer. It turned out that Hampton’s bodyguard was an FBI informer. There was—the police pretended that they had been defending themselves from fire, but it turned out very quickly that all the firing was into the apartment. This was—I mean, this is pretty serious business, going up to Gestapo-style assassination. And, in fact, the black nationalist groups were decimated, and many others were disrupted.

Well, part of that came out from the Media files, but the major exposure was the extent to which the FBI was functioning as a political police, a national political police, as distinct from the pretext that they’re somehow defending us from crime. That’s kind of on a par with the claims that, you know, international—we should call it what it is, international terrorism—like, say, the drone campaign—is intended somehow to defend us. It has quite different aims. And, in fact, whenever the government pleads security, we should be very skeptical. That’s—for one thing, it’s kind of predictable. That’s the plea no matter what is exposed. You can think of that in connection with the Snowden exposures. So, since it’s predictable, it really doesn’t tell you anything. And when you look closely, it turns out that those pretexts quite typically dissolve rapidly on exposure, as is the case with the revelation of what the FBI was in fact doing under four administrations. It was finally—at least in theory, this was all stopped by the courts in the early 1970s, but undoubtedly, similar operations go on. [inaudible] can’t be on that scale anymore. That was unusual. But it’s very significant.